Success with Land Rover....at last!

[Washy]

We now have a french registered Land Rover!!! It took 5 minutes at the Prefecture. I had filled in all the forms beforehand, as my mairie had given me copies.They can also be dowloaded. We went for an MOT at 10am in Bram about 15 minutes from Carcassonne, we then spent half an hour trying to find the Prefecture which is hidden in the tiny back streets of the old town, then it was nearly all automated when we got in there. I took a 'queue' ticket from the machine even though it said all foreign enquires go to the acceuil desk. 'The desk' seemd to be involved in meeting a new baby and was full of cooing women, so when my number came up I just went to the Carte Grises desk, handed him my papers, new controle technique and passport and was told to go to the cash desk and you will be called. We were called almost immediately and all was printed out on a new carte grise. They kept all our old UK registration documents which felt a bit strange, but we paid and left. We then went to Geant supermarket to get the plates made up and one for each of our trailers - cost = Prefecture 134 euros and plates 40 euros. There was never any mention of us going to the Hotel des Impots to declare the VAT, I suppose because it is an old car.

So that was it, no problems at all. The Range Rover is another matter, we took the precious hologramed certificates for the LPG system to the DRIRE, the horrible man still works there, he has a desk job since they were privatised and he is the only one able to verify our papers and he is not there until Thursday so we had to leave the papers with his secretary. She says we will have another 'convocation' to bring the car in - so we start all over again........but at least we have one car available and legal to drive to the UK in if necessary.

Our old UK registration number is printed on the new carte grise is this a new thing?